New ‘Iron Man 3’ image

It looks like that shiny new armor isn’t going to stay shiny for long. So Marvel has been carefully doling out Iron Man 3 stuff in dribs and drabs to keep the fanbase satiated until the movie releases. What with Robert Downey Jr. winning the love of Los Angeles movie fans last week for pledging to buy a new digital projector for the tiny Cinefamily theater, feelings are pretty good for the star. So why not look at a picture of him after he’s had the ever-loving crap knocked out of him?

We already know that Iron Man 3 is going to pit Tony Stark against his stiffest opposition yet in the form of Asian crimelord the Mandarin. In addition to demolishing Stark’s personal life, it looks like the dude’s also demolishing at least one of his fancy suits of armor. One of the sub-villains in the flick is Firepower, a seriously powerful suit of armor that gave the Iron Avenger an ass-whipping in the 80s, so it’s fair to assume that Stark’s brutal appearance in this shot is a result of that.

One of the most amazing things about Iron Man 3 is that even though they’re releasing all of this promo stuff and the movie’s set to open in May of next year, they’re still filming – in China. We already know that Transformers 4 will probably film there in order to make it more attractive to the Asian market, so it probably pays for itself when Marvel does more shooting there. Marvel announced that major Chinese star Wang Xueqi would play the villainous Dr. Wu in the movie, and this set photo just came out last week showing that they’re still rolling film in Beijing.